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Give Toronto’s most hated new piece of public art a second chance

This is the third instalment of The Heretic, a series in which our writers express a wildly unpopular opinion.

“My God, it’s big” blared the headline of a recent CBC.ca article, predictably decrying the latest addition to the city’s admittedly spotty collection of public artworks. Taken as a statement of fact, it’s hard to refute. The piece in question, Three Points Where Two Lines Meet, a new sculpture by the much-lauded Canadian art duo Daniel Young and Christian Giroux, is anything but discreet.

Three Points Where Two Lines Meet dominates a small triangle of land at Bathurst St. and Vaughan Rd. (Rene Johnston / Toronto Star)

Looming over an awkwardly orphaned sliver of the urban landscape where Vaughan Rd. cleaves south from St. Clair Ave. W. and into Bathurst St., the piece, an angular cobbling of aluminum beams in bright yellow, blue, green and orange, imposes itself on the streetscape like an outsize erector set left behind by a giant child suddenly moved to pursue a low-flying plane. The King Kong association doesn’t feel far off: Three Points Where Two Lines Meet strains, and mightily, against the modest dimensions of its innocuous patch of real estate, feeling at any moment it might break loose.

Size isn’t the only thing that matters here, and those words in the CBC headline, spoken by Hillcrest Residents’ Association member John Smith, put forth a sizing-up of an entirely different sort, the indignant shock presiding over all. Social media echoed the sentiment with such assessments as “architorture,” “basic and cheap” or a “crane graveyard.”

Some wondered, by the day of the opening, if the deadline had been missed: “Ummm … is this still under construction?” wrote one user on Instagram. (Others took to its lukewarm defence: “I don’t mind it,” wrote one user on my Instagram feed, while another distinguished herself with an enthusiastic embrace: “I think it’s a great piece for the area which is always normally fairly blah visually to drive along / be stuck in traffic in. Super happy to see it go in.”)

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So it goes with public art: controversial at best, widely loathed at worst, the divisiveness of almost every piece as reliable as the seasons. (Rarely is the argument made that some of these spaces might be better served with a stand of hardy trees, say, or a garden; but that’s another story and one only the brave might broach, lest they be fitted with the scarlet letter of cultural heretic.)

The only widely loved such gesture I can think of in recent years involved a goofy fountain festooned with two dozen sculptures of dogs in thrall to a golden bone at its peak (part of the recent overhaul of Berczy Park) — which I, much to some readers’ irritation, am on the record for not much liking myself. If the pleasantly vapid is the high bar to which public art can aspire, then you can count me out. (The design firm plans to follow up its success with a “cat promenade” on Wellington St.)

Which brings us back to Three Points Where Two Lines Meet.

I like it. In fact, I like it a lot.

Christian Giroux, left, and Daniel Young, photographed in 2012, are no strangers to public outcry over their artworks. (NICK KOZAK / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

It’s not easy, no — I’ll give you that. Nor is it pleasant, agreeable, cute (well, I think it’s kind of cute), acquiescent or blithely decorative, fitting into some harmless beautification agenda that offends no one and pleases just as many. Young and Giroux are artists, and good ones. That being the case, their aim isn’t to make you happy (a fact their past projects here, like 2014’s Nyctophilia, a stand of multi-headed street lights in the Mount Dennis neighbourhood that inspired even more rancourmade abundantly clear.It’s to make you think.

I don’t know what’s in your head when you see Three Points Where Two Lines Meet, but here’s what’s in mine: a development industry run amok, wedging bolted-together condominiums into every available space with little regard for scale or context, polishing them up with a sparkly marketing campaign for a hard sell. (Those bright colours are as earnest as they come, lipstick on a pig if there ever was any.)

Three Points is an absurdist pleasure, straining at the borders of a useless patch of land, standing almost on tiptoe to hold its balance. I’m not sure there’s a better critical metaphor to be found for our city’s quick-build affliction, its just-add-water development agenda, its disregard for land use and public space. More than that, it’s a bit of sparkle on what has always been a grim slice of urban nowhere, a sunny wayfinder for one of the city’s most confusing corners that’s not content to merely prettify. The two are made for each other, a site-specific match that warms my heart and puts goofy canine fountains to shame.

The artwork was commissioned by the city to fit an awkward triangle of land. (Rene Johnston/Toronto Star)

That said, I don’t have to live with it, and if I lived in the second-floor apartments whose views are now exclusively of Three Points from all angles, I might feel differently.

But have patience. Icons aren’t born; they evolve. Consider that everyone loathed Henry Moore’s The Archer when it was first acquired — a mayoral election was lost over it — and now you could hardly imagine Nathan Phillips Square without it. When Moore’s LargeTwo Forms was moved from its longtime home outside the Art Gallery of Ontario at Dundas and McCaul Sts. into Grange Park, behind the gallery, it set off an outpouring of civic circumspection. If this piece somehow made Toronto what it is, then what happens if it goes?

Public art, at its best, responds to its context, but it also grows into it. Three Points has step one covered. It has something to say about its space, and its moment. Step two? We’ll see.

Murray Whyte is the Star’s art critic based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @untitledtoronto

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